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The Whole Ugly Gorilla
Genius. Directed by Michael Grandage; screenplay by John Logan (based on Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg); performed by Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Laura Linney, Guy Pearce, and Dominic West.
Desert Wolf Productions; Michael Grandage Company; Riverstone Productions; Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions, 2016.
That great ape Thomas Wolfe got loose again-this time on film-but he got only as far as the backlot of Baywatch, it appears, before the tranquilizer dart of the screenwriter injected tubercles into his brain (a myriad of them, we are told) felling him in Southern California, thus saving the citizens of Seattle (where he actually became ill in the summer of 1938) from his gargantuan death throes.
Genius, a movie purportedly about Maxwell Perkins, editor at Charles Scribner's Sons, and based on A. Scott Berg's National Book Award-winning biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, is really about Wolfe. Berg's book is more balanced and shows Perkins's interactions with all of his writers-Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ring Lardner, and James Jones among them.
Thomas Wolfe is today obscured (one might say concealed) by his New Journalism doppelgänger, Tom, and exists in our collective memory largely by virtue of the title of his final posthumous novel, You Can't Go Home Again. But Wolfe's capacity for observation of human behavior, the natural world, and human civilization is unequalled in American literature. The New York Times said of his first book, Look Homeward, Angel:
Mr. Wolfe has a very great gift-the ability to find in simple events and in humble, unpromising lives the whole meaning and poetry of human existence. He reveals to us facets of observation and depths of reality hitherto unsuspected, but he does so without outraging our notions of truth and order. His revelations do not startle. We come upon them, instead, with an almost electric sense of recognition. (Wallace 7)
Walking into Genius on opening night, I could have told you in advance the first flaw of this movie: the cars will be too clean. Car enthusiasts deliver their museum pieces to the movie set in immaculate condition-unusual because the setting in this case is the Great Depression. And, yet, one can observe that every car is washed. None are...